McIntyre Ventures has 7.5 acres under contract with United Methodist Publishing House

Oct. 15, 2012

Nashville's Music City Center rendering / File / The Tennessean

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The Tennessean

A Nashville real estate investor has 7.5-acres of prime property across from the Music City Center convention hall under contract with plans for a campus that developers hope would give the city an edge in attracting and retaining members of the “creative class.”

McIntyre Ventures see its planned Pantheon Park development becoming the gathering spot for performers, writers, coders, digital gamers, music and entertainment producers, videographers and artists. Its plans include performance halls, production and recording studios and an accelerator targeting entrepreneurs and developmental stage technologies.

“The basic premise is to take the music and entertainment vertical that Nashville is well-known for and wrapping technology around it to retain and attract more computer science-oriented individuals and creative talent in both entertainment and technology,” said local developer Tom Baldridge, founder of McIntyre Ventures and Pantheon Park.

McIntyre Ventures’ contract is with the United Methodist Publishing House, which owns the property the includes its headquarters, Cokesbury bookstore near the new roundabout and three parking lots. The 7.5-acre property is bounded by several streets including Eighth Avenue South, Tenth Avenue South, Demonbreun Street and Lea Street.

With the Music City Center on track to open in May, demand has surged for land and other properties around that area south of Broadway. Several developers planning hotels have bought properties in the shadow of the convention hall for new projects including a recent sale of a parcel that set a record for price paid for developable land near downtown.

Fred Kane, vice president of land services with commercial real estate firm Cassidy Turley in Brentwood, estimates that the 7.5-acre site could fetch more than $40 million.

“It’s the best site in Nashville,” he said, citing the 30 acres along Charlotte Pike that owner Northwestern Mutual and Boyle Investment Co. are planning to redevelop that was a temporary home for the Greyhound bus station as another prime site. “To have 7.5 acres across the street to a $1 billion convention center and hotel, that’s unbelievable.”

As the music and other industries transition to the digital age, Baldridge said the goal of McIntyre Ventures is to build an environment where creative types can function at a high level. “We’re not the ones that are going to solve the problem,” he added. “We want to create the sandbox if you will and provide the necessary equipment — whatever they need in terms of human resources and other resources to accomplish their goals.”

Mark Montgomery, a Nashville-based serial music technology entrepreneur who got a peep at plans for Pantheon Park considers scale of the project ambitious. “Whether its achievable and whether the market actually demands it is another question,” he added. “It would be awesome if it was to happen. If they could pull it off, it would be great.”

Montgomery said timing of delivery of Pantheon Park would be critical to its success, adding that Nashville is still building a critical mass of coders, tech entrepreneurs and other creative types that would be targeted by the project. “Do you build it and hope they’ll come or do you scale against demand?,” he said, suggesting that the best option might be to develop the project in phases beginning with parts that could be filled first.

Locally based Tuck-Hinton Architects is working with McIntyre Ventures on the design.

Getahn Ward covers commercial real estate for The Tennessean. Contact him at 615-726-5968 or at gward@tennessean.com. Follow him on Twitter @Getahn.